October 13, 2008 – Brian.Carnell.Com

Champions Online Entering Closed Beta

Champions Online is taking applications for its closed beta that starts in mid-November.

Cryptic Studios™ announced today that players can now sign up for a chance to participate in the first closed beta for Champions Online™, an action massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) slated for release in the spring of 2009. This PC specific beta begins in mid-November 2008 and players sign up by visiting http://www.champions-online.com/preview_application.
“This closed beta is an exciting step in the evolution of Champions Online,” said Jack Emmert, chief creative officer for Cryptic Studios. “All of us here in the Cryptic offices have been playing the game for a while now, and we’re excited to invite others in to have as much fun with Champions Online as we’ve been having internally.”

Excellent to see this progressing nicely toward a Spring 2009 release. Gives me just enough time to log another thousand hours or so in World of Warcraft before this thing comes out.

OpenOffice 3.0 Available

Open Office 3.0 is now available for multiple platforms. I absolutely hate Office-style apps to begin with since many people seem to use them as catchalls for everything they do. At least the best alternative for the 2 or 3 times a month I have to touch such bloatware is now updated.

Fascinating Gravatar Stats

A year ago, Automattic (the folks behind WordPress) bought Gravatar which is used around the web by lots of folks of to display pictures, etc. in blog posts and more.

The Gravatar blog has an update which includes some interesting stats on just how heavy the usage of Gravatars is (emphasis added),

Gravatar now lives on about 20 servers: 2 Database servers, 1 File server, 2 Load balancers, 5 Caching servers, 9 Web servers, and 1 Development server. That combination of servers is handling an average of 7,214 of your requests every second of every day. That’s a whopping 623,293,056 requests daily! 96% of all of those requests are served directly from cache. These days we get around 5,000 uploaded images every day. Even with this staggering increase in the number of requests we’ve been able to make Gravatar faster, and more reliable than it’s ever been.